Plex Media-Center Running on Jailbroken AppleTV

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Plex Media-Center Running on Jailbroken AppleTV

Forget about installing a bunch of iOS apps that are designed for touch-screens. What you really want to do with your jailbroken AppleTV is to turn it into a proper media-center. That's just what hacker Quiqueck has done, installing the OSX and iOS app Plex onto Apple's diminutive media box.

Plex is a client and server app for organizing and watching movies. You keep the media on your Mac, and then watch it there, or streamed to your iDevice. Thanks to Quiqueck's efforts, Plex now works as a (still rather janky) plugin for the new AppleTV, adding an extra section - Plex - to the AppleTV's top-level menu. From here you can browse and watch any video you have in your Plex library.

But so what? You can already stream from your Mac to your AppleTV, right? Sure, but with Plex you can watch pretty much any format of video, including stuff you have ripped or downloaded into formats not natively supported by iOs.

The hack isn't straight plug-and-play. You'll need to get your hands dirty in the terminal to get things working, and there are still some kinks in the UI, and you can't yet stream music or watch an image slideshow, but those are just details. The $99 AppleTV just got a whole lot more useful.